MENMD2LBW: Literature Between the Wars 1918-39
Credits: 20 credits
Module Director: Dr Andrew Palmer
The period 1918-1939 was a complex and traumatic one in our history – and one of unprecedented experiment in the arts. In the wake of the First World War, and in the slipstream of the Second, writers had to find new ways of representing experience, and new ways of validating the role of the imaginative writer in society. This module explores the fiction and poetry of the period with particular attention to the relationships between literary form and cultural contexts.
The first half of the module is concerned with the rise of so-called Modernism. We will begin with Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, an intriguing mixture of traditional and Modernist storytelling, before engaging with two challenging and exhilarating works of ‘High Modernism’: Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway and Eliot’s five-part poem ‘The Waste Land’. In the second term, we move into the thirties, when a rising sense of political and cultural crisis led writers to engage with the issues of the day. Here we will turn to the often overlooked women poets of the period, such as Valentine Ackland, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Naomi Mitchison, and two novels – probably Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover with its radical treatment of sexual mores, and Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight, a unique exploration of the suffering of the individual in the modern city.
Texts may include E.M. Forster, A Passage to India; Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’; D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover; Jane Dowson, Ed. Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Anthology; Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight.
Assessment is by a 500-word Critical Commentary exercise (10%), a 2000-word coursework essay (40%) and a closed-book examination paper of two hours (50%).